First they gave us the Great Depression. Then they gave us the Great Society. And now we get the Great Hijack. America, we need to talk.

Good afternoon. I am John Knapp, and I am honored to speak today. Thank you. I don’t know how well I can do this without a teleprompter and God-like reverb in the loudspeakers, but I’ll try……

It is a tragedy of human nature that throughout history, tyrants so often arise to make war on freedom. Evil men have always come along to crush God’s gift of freedom beneath selfish purposes. The words “live and let live” mean nothing to tyrants. A tyrant’s creed goes no further than “DO unto others”. Where tyrants swell, humanity shrinks. But not here, and not us. America has faced down tyranny many times. Now we must do it again. And we will, because it is who Americans are and what Americans do.

People who write history will puzzle long and hard over these most recent sins of ours. They’ll wonder how the stars could have lined up wrong over America. They’ll research what might have been placed in our drinking water. Mistakes like this don’t just “happen”. There has to be some reason why a majority of normally rational Americans voted kakistocracy down on their own heads. A kakistocracy is a government by the least qualified or the most unprincipled citizens, and this is precisely where we are: the inmates are holding the keys.

There’s a billboard out on I-75 which begins, “Now it’s personal.” These are instinctive, emotional words, which a majority of Americans are now feeling, even in their sleep. “Now it’s personal.” These three little words have performed well for America, over the years. They were there at Independence Hall in the beginning. If you look closely you can see them there, between the lines of the Declaration of Independence. They were there, too, around the campfires at Valley Forge. They were on the parapets at the Alamo. They drifted in the smoke at Gettysburg. They were beneath the deadly mists that hung over the Siegfried Line. They were in Normandy, and at Iwo Jima. They were there at the Berlin Wall. These three little words have faithfully stormed every fortification where tyranny would try to separate Americans from their freedom. “Now it’s personal.” These three little words are going to work in the upcoming mid-term elections, too.

But we have work to do. We nowadays are going to have to make the same resolutions that Americans did in 1775, that: 1) I’m not living like this, 2) I will not fear the king, and 3) some things are more important than me and my stuff. We have blithely crossed the Rubicon, from freedom, through a nanny state, to a bully state. Bully states want to level the incomes and the outcomes of their people, even through jealousy and envy. “Go ahead”, says the bully state. “Thou shalt covet”. Bully states never end well, as their tyranny can be enforced only at gunpoint through government force.

While it is God’s design that all men are born equal, it is a Law of Nature that all will NEVER stay equal, and this is the ever-present fly in the liberal ointment. It is the central flaw in Socialism, Fascism, Marxism, and Communism. To maintain their power, these bully states must always outlaw the truth (hello, political correctness). For the modern bully state to rule, it must make all its subjects comfortable with its dishonesty. There are no safe zones, no free spaces in a bully state. Socialism begins by bullying some of its subjects, but always ends in bullying all of its subjects.

Congress has been ruling us like subjects for some time now. They rule against the public will. They ignore the Constitution. More often than not their oaths of office aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. They don’t even read the bills they enact, the bills from which they exempt themselves, the bills that the rest of us had better live under. They are practicing inter-generational theft. By 1775 standards we suffer taxation without representation in every way imaginable. In essence, and in effect, Congress lies, cheats, and steals. They have disparaged the Constitution in favor of their “new-found” powers. Their ever-growing army of constituents, from those on the government dole to those on the government payroll, is perfectly content to offload their life’s responsibilities and their living expenses onto the public treasury and the general public. The corruption accumulates, the kakistocracy accommodates, and the socialist band plays on.

It is not enough to defeat liberalism at the ballot box when we have a president who is purposefully orchestrating America’s decline. He is anti-prosperity, anti-wealth, anti-national heritage, anti-Constitution, anti-capitalist, anti-free market, and anti-common sense. He is the anti-Reagan! His deceit and treachery demand a more serious response from us than merely checkmating his agenda. Conservatives must run on impeaching him in 2011. Barack Obama is a bully with a “bully pulpit”, for he is a would-be dictator on a mission to unmake America. We are going to show him, and his liberal congress, that America does not belong to tyrants.

We are engaged in a struggle for all we hold dear. We must ask ourselves how America got where we are, facing this wholly manufactured crisis. As our government becomes more slovenly and corrupt, is each of us still just a citizen and taxpayer, or are we more like an accessory and accomplice? When we can see openly lawless government, what are we willing to do about it? Does the Tenth Amendment guarantee us the right to refuse to support dishonest government? What obligations do we have to our children, to the past, and to the future? What would the founders and those in the graves at Arlington ask of us? What does God, the author of our freedom, expect of us now? We will find our answers, because we are not here, just along for the ride.

Communism, which is socialism full-grown, tells the lie that religion is the opiate of the masses. Truth is, the opiate of socialism is government. Government is the drug, the suffocating addiction of every society hooked on socialism. Liberals and socialists are its dealers and pushers. The cost of this addiction is high. It will take away your dignity, your pride, your honesty, your personal incentive, your individualism, your exceptionalism, your liberty, your freedom, and your country. They will all fade away. The America we knew is being forced into exile. Our founders provided Constitutional restraints against the drug of runaway government, but our liberal Judases would deliver us into socialism anyway.

So we will do what Americans have always done. We are going to fix this, because now it’s personal ….again.

Thank you very much.

Mrs. Kris Anne Hall

We The People Must Inform Ourselves

I would like to speak to you today on the subject of INFORMING OURSELVES.

Thomas Jefferson warned "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

We have enjoyed the benefits left to us by previous generations. America has had the greatest medical system, the greatest technologies, the strongest military, the greatest economy. However, as our nation has prospered we have become distracted by our luxuries, busied by our labors and lazy toward our liberties. We have allowed the enemies of freedom to worm their way into positions of power and influence.

The Heritage Foundation says it like this, “There is widespread ignorance of American history... We face an education system that upholds mediocrity in the name of relativism; an ever-expanding and centralized government, unmoored from constitutional limits; judges openly making laws and shaping society based on pop-philosophy rather than serious jurisprudence…At the root of all these problems is a pervasive ignorance about the core principles that define America and ought to inform our politics and policy.”

Unfortunately, I would agree with them. That’s why the tea-party movement is so important and so encouraging. I am actually encouraged that the Tea-Party is not a party at all; it is We the People. We the People founded this nation and I believe - We the People will take it back!

But We the People must Inform Ourselves if we wish to take back our nation for ourselves and our children. Notice I did not say that we need to be informed, rather we need to inform OURSELVES. Truth is Power and it is up to us to search out and secure the Truth. The Bible says, “…ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” If we arm ourselves with truth and act on that truth we can be free from the bondage that ideological tyrants would desire to enslave us with.

Patrick Henry said in his famous speech from St. Johns Church in 1775. “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. “

Patrick Henry’s experience with a heavy handed government illuminated his understanding of the future… And if American Liberty is to continue, we must inform ourselves and arm ourselves with the collective experience of those that have come before. I want to mention four things as briefly as I can on the subject of Informing Ourselves.

First, We the People must inform ourselves on our Core Principles. A principle can be defined as a standard based upon truth and experience, and which serves as a foundation upon which thought and action are built. A primary principle upon which this nation rests is Constitutionalism – which is an understanding that the operation of our government and the security of our liberty are to be guided by our founding documents, interpreted according to the framer’s intent.

The Declaration and the Constitution have been relentlessly attacked in modern times. Our own President has implied that our Constitution’s ideas are flawed. The professors in our law schools deride its relevance. Progressives would have it be as malleable as silly putty. But We the People recognize that the Declaration and Constitution have served as the bedrock of our freedom for hundreds of years. The genius with which our founding fathers laid down the principles in these precious documents, I believe, can only be attributed to the providence of God. And we have a solemn duty to ourselves and our posterity to become informed in the Core principles contained in our founding documents.

Get a copy of the Declaration and Constitution; study them. Research the history of how they came to be. Acquaint yourselves with men like John Leland and the Baptist Union of Virginia, without whom there would be no Bill of Rights. Read the wisdom of George Washington in his farewell address and be grounded by the experience of one our nation greatest heroes.

–We the People must Know our core principles- Become not only grounded in them, but become their champions. For, freedom of speech has no voice of its own, but it waits in silence for you to plead its case. The right to assemble will sit alone until you, its champions, gather in the face of despotism. Our forefathers cry out through the pages of history, but unheard until you give the written word - voice and life. When our history is lost either through revision or apathy, then our liberty is lost as well.

–We the People must Know our Core principles and stand for them without wavering…for they are our liberty.

The words of Patrick Henry still ring true 235 years later, “Why stand we here idle?,” he said, “What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Secondly, We the People must not only inform ourselves on our Core Principles, must inform ourselves about Contrary Principles. If our core principles serve to secure and maintain the liberty we wish to enjoy, then it stands to reason that there are contrary principles that threaten that same liberty, and we must be able to identify these enemies of our liberty.

Sun Tzu says in his Art of War, “Know thine enemy as thyself.” We must always remember that our enemies are not people or parties, but the freedom-destroying principles that they espouse. We must inform ourselves on the principles of progressivism, socialism, communism; and the mechanisms these philosophies use such as redistribution of wealth, centralization of power, progressive taxation, and restrictions on free speech. Once we are informed on these principles we will then recognize them. And we must oppose them regardless of the party or personality attempting to employ them.

I say again, We must not give a free pass because of personality or party affiliation. It is ironic that Teddy Roosevelt is heralded as a great hero of the Republican Party, when in fact history testifies that he was the leader of the anti-constitutional progressives in 1912. It was also under the Republican Party that the refundable tax credit was enacted, allowing progressives to engage in redistribution of wealth and enslave citizens with the tax refund.

Am I anti-Republican? No; but these enemies of our liberty entered in because we put party over principle. The president recently suggested that his program of socialized medicine was okay because Republican Mitt Romney proposed the same program. It is not wrong because of who proposed it; it’s wrong because it is based on principles that are contrary to Liberty.

You would not allow anyone to feed your child rat poison whether the giver was Satan or Santa Claus. Progressivism, however, does not come in a bottle with skull and crossbones. It shows up as something or someone who wants to “help” and it will have a cute little name like acorn. It will talk about fairness and recovery; aide and stimulus; always sounding positive, but underneath - a deadly poison. Again we must be grounded in our Core principles, but we must also be guarded against these Contrary principles which poison our freedom and destroy our future.

We the People must not only inform ourselves about Contrary Principles, but we must also inform ourselves about Candidates. We should now realize that a charismatic personality, eloquent speechmaking, and catchy slogans do not a leader make. We must identify candidates who hold true to the right principles and who will not sacrifice those principles for politics or power. Some would say you must compromise if you hope to accomplish anything. Surely, cooperation and negotiation are essential in government, but a principle by its very definition is a foundational and guiding rule, and so compromising a principle damages the very foundation.

If sound principles cause me to be opposed to a proposal, then an offer of money or jobs for my state should not change my position. Let’s inform ourselves about candidates and issues and make an informed vote.

Lastly, and I close, We the People must inform ourselves about Current Events. It’s encouraging to see the awakening going on around the country, but the cynic in me says this – “only someone who was sleeping needs an awakening.”

Thomas Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” We cannot take time off. We cannot stick our head in the sand. We cannot slumber even for a moment.

The Tea-Party movement can’t simply be an awakening. Once we have reclaimed our nation from the forces that would steer us away from our Core principles, we must establish a lifestyle of vigilance. We must stay informed and stay involved.

First step - the 2010 elections; Next step – the 2012 elections; THEN we reach The Beginning…The beginning of a revitalized and reconnected CITIZEN government.

Our cry must be this “We the People have awakened. We the People have informed ourselves; and We the People will never sleep again!!!” Thank you and God bless you.